The Naki and Back #1

So once upon a long time ago The Husband bought a Rabbit motor scooter. Not sure why. The kids had quite a lot of fun on it. Eventually it died a quiet death with the engine giving up the ghost.

Years later, along came Trade Me, and for a few years The Husband has had a search running, and finally he became the proud owner of two old Rabbit motors. Except they had to be collected - from Inglewood. He seemed to think that we could zip down and pick them up in a day. Which we could have, but it would have been a long day with nothing to show for it but a couple of dirty old engines, so I reminded him that every WOMAD we talk of how we should go to New Plymouth at a different time of the year and see something other than the racecourse and Pukekura Park.

We love WOMAD so much that we immerse ourselves in it - WOMAD 2012 was the first year we left the festival for anything other than essential supplies (bread, milk, whisky) - we went for a walk on the Saturday morning and found the magnificent shoreline walkway and the Len Lye wand. We wanted to return and see the other end, with its bridge.

So after picking up the Rabbit engines and finding a motel, we drove to the northern end of the 10 kilometre walkway.

 We thought the bridge represented a fish, but silly us, it's a wave! Whatever, it's perhaps the loveliest bridge I've seen, and useful too - it also carries sewerage!

  Paratutu and the port.

 

  Just look at 'my' mountain? Isn't he stunning?

 You can read about how Taranaki came to live by the coast here.

 We were treated to a wonderful areobatics display as we walked along - I had to keep stopping as walking along looking up instead of down is not a good idea when recovering from a torn calf muscle.

I lived in New Plymouth for the last two years of my schooling, boarding at New Plymouth Girls' High School in 1967-68. Every day as I walked the short distance from the boarding hostel to school and back, I would look up at this glorious mountain. He has stayed in my heart ever since.

A Matter of Perspective

 Getting up this glorious autumn morning, the sky was clear and a touch of frost kissed the grass in the shade.

 From the dining room I saw glorious liquid amber tree, its top half glowing against the pale blue sky. My whole body responded with an overwhelming sense of joy.  I grabbed the camera - but the first photograph I took did not show what I saw.

 Oh! I had not even seen the grey, collapsed sun umbrella!

 Another photo - Oh! I hadn't noticed the electric fence standard in the foreground, or the water tank on its stand, or the torn, green windbreak.

 And - look at the rough driveway.

I thought about how my mood and attitude colours my life: when I am low I see the flaws, the 'ugly', and fail to see the beauty and goodness in my world. When I am high I see nothing but the good and the wonderful and the joyful. The camera, however, just sees it all without judgement. And having written thus far, and looked at the photographs, I find that actually, I like that first photo best!

Two nights ago, I spent the evening listening to four amazing musicians playing jazz which filled me to overflowing with the sense of a world teaming with possibilities. In the darkened room, I watched a silhouetted triangle formed by the saxophone and the saxophonist's body, and inside that triangle, fingers so elegant and skilful - the bright, spotlighted hand of the bassist who stood behind.

The sight of that tree framed by the umbrella recalls both that music, and that sense of  limitless possibility.

It's all a matter of  perspective.

Coming Home

In the east,

shining white windmills

stand still against the high blue

fading to softest pink,

holding their breath,

waiting

for winter southerlies.

In the west,

a child’s black-pencilled seagulls

rise up from their meal

in the remains of the maize field

and fly toward the sun

setting in the luminescent

gold-edged, apricot sunset.

A lopsided

pale silver

moon

watches,

quizzically.

ps I love living where I do, and coming home is always a joy - but particularly tonight.

You Never Talked of The War

 On ANZAC Day

we’d drive to Auckland,

wearing red paper poppies,

you, your row of glowing medals,

me, with fresh Brasso remains

still under my finger nails.

We attended the service,

sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’

choked up for The Last Post

and left our poppies

next to the wreathes.

And afterwards, lunch,

then hide and seek

around the tables and chairs

with nameless children

seen just once a year

while you reminisced

with the 22^nd Battalion boys

and the wives chatted.

But you never talked of the war,

not at home

not to us.

When I did my OE

I got a letter in reply

to my stories of Italy

asking, “What did you see at Casino?

You DID go to Casino?”

and I replied, “We haven’t

got enough money

to be gambling.”

The sharp response came,

“Not A casino, Casino!

You did go there?”

But we had simply driven past,

not stopped to reflect

on how you killed and

came close to death

yourself, and in fact how

something in you

had indeed died

in that battle.

You had never talked of war,

not at home

not to us.

There Is No Doubt Now

March has gone, taking its equinox with it.
The garden has gone to seed.
The bees have offered up their harvest.
The chestnuts are gathered and stored.

There’s no doubt now

The dark days are upon me.
This year, no escape to northern lands
where the sun stays in the sky
for almost all the day,
and the heavens are never completely dark.

There’s no doubt now

The dark beast is out there,
waiting, hoping, I’ll forget for a moment
when the sun shines briefly,
pretending there’s still a day, or two, of summer.
Waiting, hoping that I’ll leave a door ajar
a window not quite clipped shut.

There is no doubt now.

I am afraid.
I have spent two years
gluing mySelf back together.
The cracks are visible, the joins ugly,
and some slivers are still missing,
lost to the darkness forever

There is no doubt now

I’m hanging on to every last bit of light,
but I am filled with fear
of the descending darkness
which permeates every crack in mySelf

There is no doubt now.

The only slim chance to win through
is to dance with the darkness.

This year I have been feeling the dark draw in on me ever since the equinox. I don't know if it's real or if it's fear of a possible return to that disintegration of my Self. I have ordered a 'happy light' - hope it gets here soon, and works the way it's meant to.

A Slow Food Breakfast

So first I feed Bob the Dog because he never hassles me for food. Then the cats because they do.

 Off to see my ducklings and Momma-on-Loan with the little bit of food they don't really need, but love and insist on having. 

They live in the orchard, so that's the place to stop and have instalment one of my breakfast: tree-ripened nectarines. They are small but tastier than any store-bought fruit.

 

 By the time I have wiped the last of the nectarine juice from my chin and started walking down to the chook run, the ducks have headed for the water for a drink and a swim.

Before I make it to the chooks, I have to stop for instalment two - a crisp nashi or two. Again, small - the indoctrinated voice in my head says, "you should have thinned them months ago and then you'd have bigger fruit" but seriously - why? Does it matter to me that I have 2 or 3 nashi instead of one? Thinning time could be spent on other things - like standing enjoying the view.

After feeding the chooks, wishing they hadn't wrecked the fig tree (several of its branches have been broken off by the chooks perching in the small tree)

my walk takes me along to the luisa plum trees

and I pick a handful.

 Past the beans - so crunchy, raw, straight from the bean-frame.

I admire the bumble bee busy collecting pollen and nectar,

 and the wild carrot flowers just for being so very beautiful.

 I collect a few sprigs of lemon balm,

 nibble a couple of late strawberries

 and head inside for a cup of herb tea

with home grown honey, feeling peacefully and joyfully at one with my slow world.

Coming Alive - What Next?

For the most part of my sixty years I have suffered from bouts of depression interspersed with generalised negative thinking. Fortunately, I've always also had brief encounters with happiness, and with  joy, euphoria, or what Abraham Maslow called 'peak experiences'.  (Time to re-read this man's work.)

When I first experienced these euphoric moments I tried to find ways to make them happen more often, but then, because my general outlook has been so negative, I quickly became fearful of the power of this joy, and learned to suppress it. I have always been an emotional person, and as a child my mother tried to teach me to suppress emotions: I remember being punished and sent to my room for getting angry, which I can understand because my anger was pretty loud and often violent. But I also remember being sad and being sent to my room until I cheered up. Worse still, I remember being sent to my room to calm down when I was skipping and singing happily. So I guess it's understandable that I learned how to be expertly unhappy when depression moved in at puberty!

Never mind - I'm almost grown up now, and I've not only decided to cheer up, I've learned how to do it. It's hard work, but I really am happier than I can ever remember, even though nothing much has changed in my physical, 'real' world. Furthermore I have rediscovered the magic of euphoria - and when I'm alone I can take myself there again. It could get addictive if I'm not careful!

With the increasing feeling of well-being I am learning all kinds of things that most people probably learn in childhood! I have learned to accept the the past instead of constantly brooding on everything I did wrong, didn't do that I wanted to, didn't do because although I didn't want to do something then, I now wish I had, just always thinking about the wrong moves. And then I'd think about all the people who did me wrong and all the people I did wrong to - and so it would go on.

There are things I'm a bit sad about still - I don't know if I'll ever not feel sad about not learning to dance, and about not having a partner who wants to learn now, when it's way too late to do that sort of dancing with anyone other than my partner. However, I am okay about it now because.......

I've realised that if I wrote down all the things that I wish I'd done and all the things I still would like to do, there are way more than I could have achieved in a long life if I'd started the minute I was born! Sure there are things I'm too old for, too unfit for, not talented enough for, not educated enough for, but there are more than enough to keep me busy, excited, stimulated for longer than I wish to be alive. I'm starting another list of things I want to do, in my Journey Book, (which started out as my depression book, but which has evolved.)

Make cheese.....make sourdough bread......dance in the rain again......travel to Golden Bay and to Stewart Island......get stoned like I 'should' have done in the hippy days of my youth.....write happy poetry.......visit our friend in Australia.......die, not in my bed, nor by my own hand, but blowing bubbles.

A Summer Morning at Secret Waters

What a glorious day for a yeoman farmer! It was quite autumnal when I got up, not a cloud in the sky, but that crisp, cold freshness that usually comes later in late March and April. Great weather for scything though. Scything is best done in the morning before the dew has dried, and the grass toughened up. I am getting better at scything, and did around twelve trees before hunger drove me inside for breakfast. If I keep this up, then this year we should be able to find all the feijoas as they fall on the ground.

 After a larger breakfast than usual - I don't usually do an hour's hard labour before eating - I went out harvesting. I have only ever had one good year of garlic before but this year I have more than enough to keep both the vampires and most of my friends at bay for the entire year.

In my eager anticipation of our trip to Alaska in June 2011, I forgot about buying garlic bulbs for planting until I was checking emails while in Fairbanks, and found one from Koanga reminding me. The wonders of the internet - I ordered some online and they arrived the day after we got home. I ordered lots, assuming I would, as usual, only get a few to grow. Wrong!

Koanga was also offering tree onions, which I had never heard of, let alone grown. They too have flourished, and if they taste good, I'll plant more this July. And this year I will have plenty of healthy specimens to use instead of ordering in.

 

 A couple of years ago I bought a mini green house to start our seedlings in inside. It came from The Warehouse and only cost about $60, so we were surprised that it worked so well, and didn't fall to bits a month later. Now I have found a new use for it. Without it's plastic cover, it makes a great rack to finish drying off the garlic and tree onions.

 It was hot out there in the sun, so I gathered my lunch.

 And after a shower, I ate them with home-grown honey, and store bought yoghurt - must go and start some home made yoghurt now, using the raw organic milk I buy locally.

Then I'm going to settle down and do some work on my Apicultural Knowledge course.

Many people tell me "Oh! You don't work? I couldn't bear that, I need the mental stimulation of my job," just as they used to say the same thing when I was a stay-at-home homeschooling mother. Well, I find my life quite stimulating enough, thanks! Particularly in this wonderful era of the internet, which allows me to talk to distant friends and family in the evening, and of easy travel, which allows me to go to Auckland tomorrow night to spend an evening listening to really good jazz. The life of a modern yeoman farmer is a good one!

Weed or Wonder?

A few years ago a visitor to Secret Waters told me I must immediately dig out the agapanthus growing on our bank. Well, there were/are too many other things needing doing so the agapanthus remained.

I don't know what I do when I'm asleep, but I almost always wake up the same way. I open my eyes and the first thing I see is my tattoo, which brings a smile to my face. Next I role over and look out through a small, long window.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

 

How could I dig them out? They are such inspiring flowers. They leap up, throw out their arms and yell to the world:

 

"Here I am! Look at me! I'm so fucking gorgeous! Let's dance!"

Tuis in the Crimson

 
Our pohutukawa tree respected my 'we-are'not-having-christmas-at-our-place' this season and did not start flowering until after the dreaded day. Now it is in full glorious bloom and there are at least five tuis hanging out in amongst the crimson wonder.They are in and out all day, and though they never put money in the parking meter, their singing is so wonderful I don't write them infringement notices.

Unreasonable Fear

I've lived my life with a cloud of fear hovering over my head: fear of spiders and worms and rejection and people and being late and being early and slow death and pain and high places, both real and metaphorical, and being alone and not being alone and being laughed at and hurting others and hurting myself and of being happy.........

"Feel the fear and do it anyway" is the title of a book I have heard of but never read. It is also a phase that has often been thrown at me like a mantra by people who seem to live their lives by trite phrases of this kind. Those who read a self-help book, pick out little gems and wave them around in the air without actually making meaningful changes in their lives. Then they throw away that book  away and find a new one. I'm not one of those people: I read a self-help book  and mutter, 'well, that was a waste of time, that'll never work,' and go find another without making meaningful changes

But so many of my fears are not reasonable. Worms? Those amazing creatures who turn decomposing matter into the humus that in turn feeds my vegetable garden? I've worked on that one - I admire them greatly, but still don't like them. I can, however, pick one up off the cobblestones, where it is going to dry out and die, and place it in a cool shady garden where it can burrow down into the soil once more. I can even pick up a whole handful from the worm farm to show people.

Fear of hurting other people has made me do things that have harmed myself. It's reasonable - essential even - to make compromises in relationships, but not to the extent that I damage myself. A relationship that damages me is not worth having, and yet I always felt that everyone else in the world was more valuable and worthy than me, and even though I do not believe in any kind of  god, I have a huge superstitious fear that whenever I put myself before others I am invoking some kind of cosmic retaliation. The remnants, no doubt, of a hell-fire and brimstone Presbyterian minister who terrorised me as a child. I've been working on that one but have a long way to go.

Recent discussions got me thinking about why I am afraid of doing some things other people enjoy. I realised that just not doing things when my first reaction is fear, is as stupid as the 'feel the fear and do it anyway' as a way of living. Much as some aspects of paintball appeal to me, I really don't deal with pain well. I rarely notice pain while I'm doing something, but the pain of physical bruising that continues afterwards drains me: I'm not going to go play with my son and his friends in the bush. And that's fair enough: feel the fear and do it anyway? Nah! Not paintball. But other fears are not so reasonable.

I have decided that this year my goal is to take real awareness into my fear of life and to challenge the reasonableness of those fears. I'm not even going to consider jumping out of an aeroplane with a scrap of fabric attached to, or possibly detached, from my back. That is a reasonable fear - it's why adrenalin junkies do it - it IS dangerous! But I am going to work on my fear of going past the third rung of a ladder.

I'm going to invite a woman I met recently over for coffee, because she's a really interesting person, and she lives nearby and I'd really like to make a new local friend. Just writing that down makes my stomach churn with terror. Stop. What's the worst that can happen? The worst she can do is say, 'well, fuck off, why would I want to know you?' And then I will be in exactly the same position as I am now, right? Hmmmm - I know it's not that easy for me - in fact I've never invited someone for coffee until I've known them for, literally, years. It's a huge fear for me. However, unlike the fear of jumping out of aeroplanes or getting bruises from paintballs, this is not a reasonable fear.

There's nothing wrong with fear - it's a lifesaver at times. But I have lived 60 years with a raft of fears that are unreasonable, or which were reasonable once, but are no longer so.

I will examine my fears, and I will judge them, and those found wanting in reasonableness will be driven into exile. And I AM going to totally destroy my fear of being happy.